The rumors of Java 5 being horribly broken beyond all usability on Leopard are, quite frankly, bullshit. It’s faster, has better integration with the OS, the Aqua L&F is significantly improved, it has full support for 64 bit and a huge raft of bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements.

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R&D on the Apple Human Interface.
We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
mousing.

The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than
keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently
forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard
is faster. […]

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to
press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive
function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually
experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the
decision simply ceases to exist.

I read this long ago in Tognazzini’s Tog on Interface, and have been looking for a URL to it for years. Found it via the aforelinked article by Scott Stevenson.

If Leopard shipped and it looked essentially the same as Tiger, I think most non-programmers would pass it by. At first glance in screenshots and the back of the box, potential buyers would not see any signs of change, and therefore would not see any hope of new experiences which justify the cost. This would do a great disservice to the mountain of improvements in the underlying system.

Intego Security on a Trojan hosted on porno sites, that tricks users into thinking they’re installing a QuickTime video codec that will allow them to watch free videos:

This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac’s DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites.

Lots of folks ask “why doesn’t sun just do the JDK for Mac?”. The real answer is “because Apple wanted to do it”. They’ve wanted to do all sorts of customization and integration that only they could do — because they own the OS.

Tuesday, 30 October 2007

Another option for those looking for a third-party mouse driver, recommended by several DF readers. ControllerMate is a lot more than a mouse driver, though — it’s a “controller programming tool that allows you to customize the behavior of your HID devices — keyboards, keypads, mice, trackballs, joysticks, gamepads, throttles, among others.” The “programming” is done visually. So in addition to doing things like specifying a custom mouse acceleration curve, you can remap the keys on your keyboard. Very impressive, and it’s just $15.

Java on Mac OS X has gotten so bad that James Gosling, creator of Java and Sun’s developer platform CTO, has switched from a MacBook to a notebook running Solaris. What an outrage that the best platform to develop for Sun’s Java is Sun’s own operating system. Sounds great:

There is one area that’s a problem: when I close the lid on my laptop, it keeps right on running. It doesn’t suspend. I have to manually shut the system down.

But there’s a ton of additional good stuff — I think it’s safe to say this really is a “2.0” release, the biggest linguistic upgrade to AppleScript ever. (Still no sign of the updated AppleScript Language Guide promised by Apple, though.)

I’m getting a lot of email asking what Logitech mouse owners should do if they want to use their extra buttons but who don’t want to install Logitech’s APE-powered Control Central software (which doesn’t work entirely on Leopard, because APE doesn’t yet work on Leopard).

I’ve been using Alessandro Levi Montalcini’s $20 USB Overdrive for years. In addition to giving you additional control over buttons, it allows you to set far faster mouse tracking speeds than Apple’s mouse driver. If you’re frustrated that Mac OS X’s fastest mouse speed is still too slow, USB Overdrive is worth a look. The latest version is certified Leopard compatible and adds support for Bluetooth mice.

John Nack on a survey of 1,026 professional photographers in North America regarding their RAW processing software:

66.5% using the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in

23.6% using Lightroom

5.5% using Aperture

To be fair to Aperture, it might be helpful to remove Windows
users from the equation for a moment. Even after doing so,
Lightroom’s usage among Mac-based pros is still nearly double that
of Aperture (26.6% vs. 14.3%).

What’s really interesting is that Lightroom’s use among Mac-using photographers wasn’t just higher than Aperture’s — it was higher than the number of Lightroom users on Windows. I think Mac users are more likely to try new apps.

Contrary to most rumors, input managers still work on Leopard (at least on my pre-GM seed), but for an input manager to be loaded there are now a few requirements it needs to fulfill.

The confusion over this is that during the pre-release seeding this summer, input manager support in Leopard changed quite a bit. For a while, they really didn’t work at all. In the shipping version, they work, but installing them now requires administrator authentication (so the potential problem where they could be installed silently behind your back, as with Smart Crash Reports, is now closed). But they’re officially unsupported, don’t work at all in 64-bit apps, and are “likely to be disabled in a future release”.

In the new iCal, double-clicking an appointment causes an inspector box to pop up right next to the appointment itself; to edit appointment details, you click an Edit button in that inspector box. (You can also select the appointment and hit Command-E.) That might seem like one click too many to some users; some might also object to the fact that the inspector box obscures part of the calendar.

It’s greatly annoying to me that events don’t open in editing mode when double-clicked. Cmd-E is good to know.

Nice evolutionary update to my favorite pocket-size camera. Same lens as my original GR Digital, but now features “a new processing engine said to ‘dramatically’ improve high-ISO noise performance”. Also features much-improved RAW performance. Glad I didn’t wait for this when I bought mine back in April, but I highly recommend it to anyone in the market for a point-and-shoot — although with “availability in a month or two”, it might be cutting it close for Christmas.

Hulu, NBC and Fox’s joint online video venture, is in private beta-testing, but its URLs are easily guessable. This Slashdot comment links to this sample page of 10 embedded Hulu videos. The quality is great for web-page Flash video, certainly better than YouTube. But that doesn’t help if you want to watch them on your, you know, TV set — or on a portable device, or full-screen at a decent resolution on your computer.

Update: Apparently they’re preventing non-U.S. IP address ranges from accessing the video; at least one DF reader in Great Britain got an “Unfortunately this video
is not currently available in your country or region. We apologise for
the inconvenience” message when he attempted to view the above samples.

NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker claims Apple “destroyed the music business in terms of pricing”. As John Paczkowski points out, the going rate for digital downloads pre-iTunes was zero. Zero.

So while they sit around until hell freezes over waiting for Apple to voluntarily just start sharing iPod hardware profits with entertainment companies for no good reason whatsoever, that’s what they’re going to get for video now, too: zero.

Monday, 29 October 2007

I suspect that when it appears that Back to My Mac is accessing your system without prompting for a username and password for a user on that machine, it’s using the Keychain, rather than accessing it via some means that doesn’t require a password.

Sunday, 28 October 2007

I think the way to sum up the correct level of anticipation for Leopard is to compare it to a movie that stars Gene Hackman or Michael Caine. You know that it’s going to be worthwhile… but the coin’s in the air as to whether it’s worth seeing right away.

Overall, the visual UI style in Leopard is much improved, but there are an assortment of odd decisions, and Rory Prior’s list covers most of the ones that annoy me. The new placement of sheets is particularly weird — to me they look like old System-6-era modal dialogs that are just floating above the window. The previous “coming out of a slot” treatment for sheets was a nice visual indicator that the sheet was connected to the underlying window.

Photo of a Microsoft Office ad in The New Yorker. It’s a guy walking past a newsstand in a city, and on the newsstand are dozens of bags of Frito-Lay band chips. Is Microsoft selling ad space within its own ads?

An important heads-up: If you’ve got APE installed, you should upgrade to Leopard with a Clean Install or Archive and Install, not an upgrade. People doing upgrades with (apparently outdated versions of) APE installed are getting stuck at a blue screen after the installation. Love the way Apple’s support document puts quotes around “enhancement” when describing what APE is.

(My upgrade advice still stands — APE is the sort of “unholy diddling with system software” that warrants a Clean Install.)

Saturday, 27 October 2007

“Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Aperture is running may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database.”

Educated guess: it’s a locking problem with the database — the backupd background daemon sees the notification from FSEvents that the file has changed since the last backup, and starts copying the file, but in the meantime, Aperture is still writing to the original database file, so the backup copy gets made while the file is in an inconsistent state. This might be a problem with other apps that use a frequently updated database file.

This includes something we talked about in a report last week: the 300+ features page had confirmed that the iPhone would sync Notes with Leopard’s Mail. It’s now gone. Erased from existence, just like any trace of Time Machine and AirDisks. It’s a good thing we saved a screenshot for posterity.

No, it didn’t. Apple has never mentioned any sort of iPhone note synching in Leopard. I mentioned this last week: the way these notes work in Leopard is that they’re saved as IMAP account email messages; Leopard Mail treats these messages differently visually. Apple’s “access them from your iPhone” claim is a reference to the fact that you can view them, as regular email messages, in the iPhone Mail app. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the iPhone Notes app.

One reason people have assumed there would be some connection between Leopard’s notes and the iPhone’s Notes app is that they both look similar by default: the yellow-paper-legal-pad background and Marker Felt text. Another is that without synching to your computer, iPhone Notes seem nearly worthless. But, alas, the features are unrelated, other than visually. Plus, I’m not sure how iPhone note synching could be a Leopard-only feature, unless Apple’s willing to tell Windows-using iPhone owners to go blow.

I think Apple changed the text of this web page because people like Chartier were confused about what they were referring to, not because they’ve removed a feature they previously promised.

Here’s the gist: When you turn on Back to My Mac synching, all you need to control your Mac remotely is your .Mac password — you don’t need to authenticate with the password for your Mac itself.

I don’t think it’s right to characterize this as a security “hole”, though — clearly it’s how the feature is designed to work. If you don’t trust your .Mac account, don’t use it. It’d be nice if there were an option to require your Mac’s password, though — and I question the decision to turn this setting on by default.

Friday, 26 October 2007

Matt Neuburg’s top gripes about Leopard. I completely agree with him about the new Help Viewer window:

When you choose from the Help menu in any application, what opens is no longer the Help Viewer application. It’s an orphan window that floats over, and blocks your view of, everything else on the screen. It belongs to no application, so you can’t hide it or switch away from it. Now, what’s the most common thing to do while you’re reading an application’s help documentation? You read something in the Help, you switch to the application to try it; you see something in the application, you switch back to the Help to learn about it. No more. Now, as soon as the help window opens, you’re stuck: you’re in the help window and that’s the only place you can be, until you close the window (or minimize it into the Dock).

Leopard is, at once, a major alteration to the Mac interface, a sweeping update to numerous included productivity programs, a serious attempt to improve Mac OS security, and a vast collection of tweaks and fixes scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the operating system.

MacJournals on MacFixIt’s “Be afraid. Be very afraid” advice regarding upgrading to Leopard and their voodoo warnings about the simple upgrade installer option:

The more afraid MacFixIt makes you of installing new software, the more often you’ll check the site — and either view the ads or upgrade to a paid subscription—to see if it’s “safe” to install yet. If you actually learn how things work and make your own judgments, you might break out of a fear-based dependency on MacFixIt, so the site does its best to prevent that from happening.

There are even scenes in this transfer that I completely re-watched just to have another chance to explore the intricacies of the sets and props. For the first time, I was able to read all of the small text Kubrick strategically placed across the film. Call me obsessed, but I found myself completely fascinated by these minor details that I’d previously been unable to enjoy.

Speaking of DF feed sponsors, my thanks to this week’s sponsor, SimpleMovieX. SimpleMovieX is a simple (duh) $29 video editor with built-in support for popular file formats and codecs unsupported by QuickTime Pro, and features that make it easy to perform simple edits, transcode between file formats, and perform batch operations on multiple files at once.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that his office had beaten a $1 million “agreement” out of Verizon Wireless that will see the carrier compensate 13,000 customers it had summarily disconnected from their “unlimited” plans because they had taken the word to mean what it means.

Scroll down to the chart comparing customer satisfaction of all the top mobile phone makers — Apple comes in first at 82 percent, and RIM’s in second place way back at 51 percent. Jiminy. (Thanks to Chris Long.)

“TaskPaper’s strength is that it lets you focus on crossing out those tasks instead of building a self-referential web of unfinished business which separates you from the cold, harsh reality of all the work you need to do.”

From a 2005 panel discussion on the future of Apple at SiliconValley.com. (This was after Apple announced their switch to Intel processors, but before any Intel-based Macs had yet shipped.)

Nathan Brookwood: I’m confident that the forthcoming Mactel
platforms will provide a great computing experience for those who
choose to move from the PowerPC platforms, but I’m also confident
that more users will have switched from Mac to Windows than from
Windows to Mac when all is said and done.

John Gruber: I’m looking forward to I-told-you-so’ing you in about
two years.

Speaking of backups and SuperDuper, here’s Shirt Pocket Software’s Dave Nanian on SuperDuper’s role in a post-Time Machine world:

Time Machine copies are not bootable until they’re restored.

In SuperDuper!, system recovery is done with a minimum of fuss and
bother, and with respect for your time. Yes, Time Machine can
restore a full system, but that’s not its strength. Doing so
requires you to actually start up from the Leopard DVD (which
you’ll need to have with you) and then take the time to restore
the backup in full, which interrupts your workflow, requires a
working, entirely separate destination device, and takes a lot of
your time — at the exact moment when you can least afford it.

You can argue that, well, of course a guy from Shirt Pocket is going to argue that SuperDuper is still relevant. But he’s right. Time Machine does not create a bootable clone of your system, and in cases of catastrophic drive failure, a bootable clone is exactly the thing you need.

JWZ on a super-simple backup strategy. I do the same thing, but with SuperDuper instead of rsync. Carbon Copy Cloner is another good choice. The basic gist is the same: buy two extra drives, use one to clone your entire boot drive daily, and use the other to clone it weekly or monthly and keep that one off-site.

Otherwise, the only cause for pause is the usual minor set of 1.0 bugs, which Apple generally fixes with software updates after a major release. I pushed my system hard for a week using the final Leopard software, and encountered occasional glitches with Spaces, automated synching among Macs and switching programs. I also found a few programs and add-ons that will need updates to run in Leopard.

Maybe some of that software would have already been updated for Leopard compatibility if Apple had provided developers with the same access to the final version of 10.5.0 that they apparently saw fit to distribute to Pogue (and, presumably, other big-publication tech writers like Walt Mossberg and Steven Levy). Given that the GM version leaked onto Usenet and BitTorrent sites anyway, what the fuck was the point of not providing it to seeded ADC developers?

Kottke has a report on Google changing their PageRank algorithm, with speculation that the aim was to penalize sites that run text link ads and scads of cross-network promotional links, such as Weblogs Inc. sites like Engadget and TUAW. A reader sent Kottke this note:

Two weeks ago I lost 80% of my search traffic due to, I believe, using ads from Text-Link-Ads, which does not permit the “nofollow” attribute on link ads. That meant an overall drop of more than 44% of my total traffic. It also meant a 65%-95% drop in Google AdSense earnings per day and a loss of PageRank from 7 to 6.

I don’t run text link ads on DF, so, unsurprisingly, my PageRank is unchanged (7). But there must be something more going on here than a penalty for text links ads, because Aaron Swartz’s site still has a PageRank of 9, and he runs text links ads. Apple.com dropped from 10 to 9, and they run neither text link ads nor cross-network promotional links.

Update: DF’s PageRank dropped from 7 to 5 at some point tonight, so I’m chalking it up to a rejiggering of the scale.

In 1896, a scientist named George M. Stratton, showing an ingenuity that must have seemed like madness at the time, conducted a fascinating experiment in visual perception with himself as the subject. He constructed a pair of goggles with special lenses that inverted his view of the world by 180 degrees, causing him to see everything upside down, as if he were standing on his head, continuously. He wore the goggles for many days, never once opening his eyes without wearing them (he would shower with his eyes closed, for example).

Ben Sargent is exactly the sort of nerd switcher I wrote about yesterday — the sort of guy who never would have considered a Mac 10 years ago, but who is now a steadfast Mac OS X convert:

For me, using a computer has only partially been about the tools that it provides. It’s also about playing. I love to install things, mess around with servers and settings, just to see if I can get it to work. It’s the same reason I bought a PSP — because it was hackable. I could make it do fun and interesting things. I could play with it, not just on it.

Right now, it’s the Mac that embodies this sense of play the best for me in the computer world.

Quick Look and Cover Flow. Together, these offer file previews on steroids. They’re utterly silly (“waste cycles drawing trendy animated junk” was my first thought) until you need them, and then they are just terrific. Being able to flip through a bunch of music or photo files looking for the right one, right in the Finder without starting up any other application, is really great.

The approach is similar to OmniFocus — but even more obsessively concerned with keeping the system focused solely on completing tasks (rather than grooming and feeding them for months while they grow long hair and learn how to drive a stick).

TechCrunch has a strange habit of blogging things where the only source is off the record. […] Anyone talking to media knows that telling a journalist something “off the record” means you’re telling them so they know it. It’s not going to stay secret. But it also clearly means that the comments aren’t to be used as a primary source.

I’ve noticed this too, but my assumption has been that Mike Arrington says “off the record” when he means “not for attribution”. If he really just turns around and publishes things he’s been told “off the record”, he’s a bigger doofus than I thought.

The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.

Agreed 100 percent. I think this applies to any product where the buyer isn’t the user, but I think the problem is especially acute with software.

In that world, Apple has some choices to make: Will its iLife and iWork applications move onto the Web? More importantly, will it compete in the mass business PC market, where the C.I.O. of an insurance company buys desktops by the truckload?

Not sure how many browsers they support, but at least with Safari 3 and Firefox 2, Apple’s web site search is now displaying live search results as you type. (Might be something that debuted with the recent redesign, but which I hadn’t noticed until now.)

BusySync is a Mac OS X System Preference Pane that runs in the background and adds calendar sharing capabilities to iCal. Leveraging Apple Sync Services and Bonjour, calendar events created by one user are instantly published and synchronized with other iCal users on the network. Users can share and edit calendars, make changes on each others calendars, and everything is automatically synchronized between each user, on each Mac.

I think BusySync is a huge deal. Leopard’s new iCal sharing is very cool, but requires a dedicated server. For a household or very small business or partnership, BusySync’s server-less “just install it on your Mac” model is perfect.

Monday, 22 October 2007

Hog Bay Software’s new deceptively simple $19 to-do/task manager; uses a plain text file format but includes support for tags and tabbed document windows. I’ve been using pre-release versions for a few weeks — definitely worth a look.

My big question, which seems to have gone unasked (and unanswered during Apple’s prepared statement) is whether Apple is accounting for iPod Touch sales on a subscription basis, like they are with the iPhone. Apple has stated that they’re using subscription-based accounting for the iPhone so as to be able to provide new features to iPhone users in future software updates free of charge. If iPod Touches aren’t being accounted for similarly, I suspect they won’t be getting the same feature updates, or at least not for free.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2007 fourth quarter ended September 29, 2007. The Company posted revenue of $6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million, or $1.01 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $4.84 billion and net quarterly profit of $542 million, or $.62 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. […]

Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macintosh computers, representing 34 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments by 400,000. The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17 percent growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone™ sales were 1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.

It’s all amazingly good news, but the stat of the day has to be that Apple sold 400,000 more Macs in the quarter than in any previous quarter ever — in the quarter immediately preceding a major new Mac OS X release, the sort of thing many people wait for before buying a new machine.

The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.

“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”

Jobs also seems to suggest that 10.6 is going to be sooner than later:

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

I thought maybe it might receive more attention if you, the Mac OS X software-buying public, were aware of the situation. The third-party software that you’re paying for, depending on, and hoping to run on Leopard, we cannot test on the final release build until we can run down to the Apple Store and pick it up, hopefully at least a few minutes before you do.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the GM version of 10.5.0 definitely contains at least some significant differences from the last version seeded via ADC to developers. Anyone taking screenshots of the Dock on the side of the screen, for example, is going to have to retake them after installing the public release.

Firefox 3 is going to look more like a Windows app on Vista and a Mac app on Mac OS X; love the parenthetical about Linux: “… we still aren’t sure what the best way to visually integrate with Linux is, given the number of different distributions.” (Via Mat Lu.)

Nikon D3 first impressions from James Russell. It’s getting harder and harder to see the D3 as anything other than the best DSLR in the world. (Even if you’re not interested in reading about the camera, it’s worth scrolling through just to look at the gorgeous photographs by Russell that accompany the article.)

Sunday, 21 October 2007

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

We are currently working on Leopard compatibility updates for FileMaker Pro 9, FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced, FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced. At this time FileMaker does not recommend the use of FileMaker 9 products on computers running the Mac OS X Leopard.

Update: According to FileMaker’s Tech Specs page, it’s a compatibility problem with Safari 3 (although I can only assume what they really mean is the version of WebKit that Safari 3 is based on), and Safari 3 is not optional on Leopard.

Saturday, 20 October 2007

Friday, 19 October 2007

The current working spec for the HTML5 standard has a lot of exciting features we would eventually like to implement in WebKit. One feature we felt was exciting enough to tackle now even though the spec is still in flux is client-side database storage.

Miguel Helft reporting for The Times on Google’s latest quarterly results:

The results show that Google is growing roughly twice as fast as the overall online advertising market, which itself is booming, and that it is expanding far more quickly than any large Internet company.

My thanks to Bruji for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Bruji’s line-up of “Pedia” apps — DVDpedia, Bookpedia, CDpedia, and Gamepedia — let you easily catalog and track your DVDs, CDs, books, and video games. Each features a great UI, iSight barcode scanning,
Spotlight integration, a full screen view and more. They’re running a promotion this week where each person who purchases an app is eligible to win a case of wine. (But so where’s the Winepedia app?)

Thursday, 18 October 2007

The Yankees offered Manager Joe Torre a one-year deal with a base salary of $5 million and the chance to make another $3 million in performance bonuses. But after 12 years and 12 postseason appearances (including four World Series titles), Torre turned it down. […]

General Manager Brian Cashman said that Torre’s successor has not been named, nor have potential candidates been formally identified. “I can promise you that the process is going to take some time,” Cashman said. “I ask for everyone’s patience as we review the individuals and make recommendations to ownership.”

I’ll repeat that, in case you’re still not getting it: the most popular portable music device in the world, the one everyone has, the default choice, the cultural icon, the device which Apple sells millions of each quarter, the device which has previously been closed off to all but Capcom, EA and Nike now has an SDK.

What we’re starting to see here (and of course in the anti-DRM letter from earlier this year) is a pretty significant shift in Jobs’ public relations strategy, in that he seems to have recognized that there are limits to secrecy.

Johnson wonders whether Apple planned all along to open up iPhone development eventually; I say yes.

Gartner’s and IDC’s numbers don’t match, but both agree that Apple is now #3 in unit sales, behind only Dell and HP. (Apple will drop back to #4 after Acer’s acquisition of Gateway is complete.) But the most important thing to remember is that Apple isn’t really after raw market share; they don’t offer any bargain PCs. The entirety of Apple’s market share is in the middle and high end of the market. Also impressive is that Mac sales are growing this fast before the release of Leopard.

The number I’d love to see computed is profit share — what share of the total profit in the PC hardware business do these companies have. I suspect Apple might be #1.

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

Apple is working on solutions that will help developers get more face time on the iPhone, but there are currently no plans to offer a “true” iPhone SDK that would allow developers to create native apps, a source at Apple has told Ars.

I strongly suspect her source was correct, however, that Apple is also working on significant improvements to MobileSafari’s web app capabilities, including offline storage.

Clever bit of design I hadn’t noticed: the iPhone screen does turn on to show a sound icon when you toggle the ringer switch with the screen off, but only if the screen has been off for more than one minute.

The move, which ended a month of speculation, is a concession to a French law that forbids bundling the sale of a mobile phone and a mobile operator. Orange plans to sell both a version of the iPhone locked to its network in France for €399, or $560, and an unlocked version, which will cost more, an Orange spokeswoman, Béatrice Mandrine, said.

Pure DF fodder: topics include digital video vs. film, the Internet as a distribution medium, Stanley Kubrick, and the city of Philadelphia, which Lynch describes as “one of the sickest, most fear-ridden, corrupt, and twisted cities, which they call the City of Brotherly Love.” (Thanks to Mark Schrimsher.)

The scary part is that the only reason the cheaters were caught is that (a) detailed logs were leaked (perhaps intentionally by a whistleblower); and (b) the cheaters were egregious — rather than using their knowledge of opposing players’ hole cards here and there, they played in a way that raised suspicion immediately.

Doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention, at least not yet, but this is pretty big:

Using iCal Server, colleagues can propose and set up meetings, book conference rooms, and more, quickly and easily. iCal Server is a full-featured, standards-based calendaring solution designed to make your life easier.

Jobs’s letter today was a bit in the tone of, “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn! We still have to get rid of the gophers, resod the grass, and finish the main house before we let you on it in a few months, you little…”

At the end, Glenn speculates about a possible “iPhone version of Leopard”, and assumes that the current iPhone OS is based on Tiger, but that’s misguided. iPhone OS X already contains technologies new to the Mac in Leopard. For example, the iPhone has LayerKit, which was an early name for the Cocoa framework now called Core Animation. (In Mac OS X 10.5, Core Animation is part of the QuartzCore umbrella framework, and there isn’t anything called “LayerKit”.) Better to think of Mac OS X and iPhone OS X as two sibling products derived from the same core technologies and frameworks than to think of iPhone OS X as a child of Mac OS X.

I’ll bet Glenn’s right, though, that there will be a signficant iPhone OS update before the SDK appears.

Long-term, within the next two years, if not far sooner, I feel certain there will be various ways for developers to write iPhone software. […] Downplaying the prospects for third-party app development in the meantime is a way of under-promising and over-delivering. By setting initial expectations that there might never be third-party software for iPhone, any future support for third-party apps will be treated as good news.

Pretty prescient, if I do say so.

Of course, I got a slew of messages from smart DF readers that my use of “wherefore” in the title was utterly wrong. (“Wherefore” means “why”, not “where”.)

Good list of previously-unpromoted new features in Leopard from Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz. Not sure where he got this one, though:

Mail’s Post-It-style notes synchronize automatically with the iPhone.

What Apple actually says is: “Your notes folder acts like an email mailbox, so you can retrieve notes from any Mac or PC or access them from your iPhone.” That’s not synching with the iPhone Notes app. What they mean is that notes created in Leopard Mail are stored, behind the scenes, as IMAP messages, and that you can read them in a way that makes them look exactly like regular emails in the iPhone Mail app. Apple has announced nothing yet regarding any connection between Leopard Mail notes and the iPhone Notes app.

Greenpeace’s write-up doesn’t once compare and contrast the iPhone’s
use of hazardous substances with that of any other mobile phone from
any other vendor.

That would have been useful: a document that, rather than whining
about one vendor not moving as quickly on this issue as Greenpeace
and others would like, shows consumers which handsets on the market
contain the least quantities of hazardous chemicals.

Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Jeff Croft’s iPhone has a sound icon on the silent switch — just the sort of indication it needs, I think, to help keep people from thinking theirs is broken when it’s engaged and stops ringing. Croft (via email), told me he bought his back on June 29 in Lawrence, Kansas, so it’s not a recent addition.

Sure, it would be nice if iPhones were made using no objectionable materials whatsoever, but yesterday’s Greenpeace announcement strikes me as sensational attention-grabbing bullshit. Their main gripe is that the earphone wiring contains a material that the city of San Francisco and EU have banned in “young children’s toys” — last I checked, the iPhone is not a young child’s toy.

Dave Winer thought his iPhone was broken because it stopped ringing; ends up he had the ringer switch turned off. It’s easy to laugh at, but I think it’s actually a non-obvious design. There’s no icon or visual indication as to what that switch does. You do get a small jolt of vibration when it’s engaged, but that doesn’t naturally imply “silent mode” to me. (Update: Yes, there’s also an on-screen icon, but that only helps if you toggle it while the screen is on.)

It’s a great feature once you know about it, but it’s potentially dangerous if you don’t. Its intuitiveness is further hurt by the fact that most mobile phones don’t offer a switch like this, even though they should.

A bunch of new features to one of my favorite utilities, including snippet groups and snippet synching via .Mac, and AppleScript snippets that expand to the result of the script. Free upgrade for registers users, $30 for new licenses.

From a Macworld reprint of an IDG News Service story by Robert McMillan on security exploits via URI protocol handlers:

Secunia ApS Chief Technology Officer Thomas Kristensen agreed that the URI protocol handler problems will probably turn up on Linux and Mac OS X. “There is absolutely a chance that similar issues could exist on those platforms,” he said.

PCWorld Business Center “Expert” weblogger Robert Strohmeyer, on why the iPhone isn’t suited for business:

For business users, an ideal phone should be able to do three things well: voice calls, messaging (including e-mail), file attachments, and web browsing.

That’s four things — and yet this might be the most accurate sentence in Strohmeyer’s piece.

At the same time, the iPhone lacks support for Microsoft Office file attachments, which means that, unlike the Blackberrys, Moto Qs, and Blackjacks you may have now, it can’t open a Word document or Excel spreadsheet at all.

A low-cost relatively low-tech “GPhone” may well be a smash hit, and a revolutionary product in the mobile phone market. But the only way it makes sense that it threatens the iPhone is if you believe there’s only room for one “it” phone. Apparently if any other phone on the market is successful, the iPhone is doomed.

Edited by Newsweek’s Steven Levy; includes a May 2006 piece by yours truly from DF: “Good Journalism”. It’s a nice anthology with slew of thoughtful essays, and it’s very handsomely typeset in Granjon.

Sunday, 14 October 2007

I think you can do very well with either the 35mm f/2 or the 50mm f/1.8 lenses. Either one will teach you vast amounts about photography that you won’t be able to get from a kit lens or any zoom that costs less than $1000. And, the sub-$100 50mm is the cheapest way to get there, if budget is a concern. If you want to learn with about the same field of view as the standard lens on a full-frame camera and have $250 to spend, consider the 35mm f/2 lens as an alternative. Either way, you’ll do just fine.

And for a bit more than the 35mm f/2, Canon also offers a 28mm f/1.8, which in addition to being a half stop faster, also has a USM motor. The only lenses I own for my Rebel are the 50mm f/1.8 and the 28mm f/1.8.

By mounting a fixed lens, you remove one axis of fiddling - the focal length to use. To take this line of thought a step further, consider making heavy use of your camera’s Program mode. Then, all you have is your camera position and your sense of timing to play with. That’s really stripping photography back to its beating heart.

Saturday, 13 October 2007

Nice little video celebrating the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but I don’t get their “it’s a good thing because Bush can’t be elected to another term” angle. If it weren’t for the 22nd Amendment, Bush never would have been elected in the first place, because Bill Clinton would have cruised to a third term. We’d quite possibly be in the middle of his fourth term now. Bill Clinton left office with the highest approval rating of any president in recent history. And, even if the 22nd Amendment were repealed today and Bush was determined to run again, I don’t think he could win the Republican nomination, let alone win the general election. (Via Kottke.)

Friday, 12 October 2007

“Al has put his heart and soul, and much of his life during the past several years, into alerting and educating us all on the climate crisis. We are bursting with pride for Al and this historic recognition of his global contributions.”

The award immediately renewed calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.

My thanks to Mentat, a new web-based project and task tracker from Brain Murmurs, for sponsoring the DF RSS feed this week.

What I like best about Mentat is that in addition to letting you group tasks as projects, it lets you easily build a daily agenda of tasks from multiple projects — a very clean separation between storing everything you need to do, and presenting only what you want to do today. Mentat also has some useful features for team-based collaboration.

I have been wanting a new lens for a while (what SLR photographer — amateur or otherwise — doesn’t?) and had been eying up some serious pieces of glass.

After doing a bunch of research, I ended up with a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. Complete opposite end of the spectrum from the various L series bits of glass linked above. Instead of dropping $1,500 or even $5,000, it cost me all of $76.30.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens is the best deal in photography. Everyone with an SLR should have one — even if you already own the $310 50mm f/1.4 (which is both technically and optically superior to the f/1.8), it’s worth buying the f/1.8 for $80 because it costs so little and weighs so much less. The f/1.4 weighs 290g; the f/1.8 weighs just 130g — the difference is very noticeable. (A Canon Rebel XT body with no attached lens weighs 485g.)

Thursday, 11 October 2007

Includes a four-minute trailer for the documentary “Runnin’ Down a Dream”, directed by Peter Bogdonavich. Here’s a clip on “The Waiting”, including footage of Eddie Vedder singing it with The Heartbreakers. Pre-ordered; we’ll be watching here at DF headquarters the day it arrives.

I’m with Brent Simmons, who wrote: “Normally I wouldn’t think much about a piece like this — but it’s by Glenn Fleishman and it’s published in TidBITS, so I am thinking that something might be happening.”

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

Palm hoped that by trimming the Treo’s size and price, it would create a totally different product, a new crossover phone for people who have never before owned phones with alphabet keys. (By Palm’s reckoning, that’s 95 percent of cellphone buyers.)

The numbered boarding passes are a fair change, and should eliminate the silly lines at the gate. But it’s hard to believe a major airline produced something designed like this. It looks like the rules for a Girl Scouts troop.

So there’s a buffer overflow in MobileSafari’s TIFF handling code that can be exploited to execute code with root privileges. And we’re supposed to treat this as good news? (Hint: it’s actually a security vulnerability.)

I’m eating a hearty meal of crow (roasted, with garlic and rosemary) today, since I’m here to tell you how interesting and downright useful I’ve found Twitter to be since being turned onto it properly at the C4 conference in August. My initial reaction to Twitter was that it was utterly inane […]

Tuesday, 9 October 2007

Once you get a piece of code to the point where you believe it works - it’s passing its tests - go back over it and edit it. That is, go back and edit it for clarity, flow, and style. Just as if it were an essay.

Trent Reznor announces that Nine Inch Nails is no longer under a recording contract with a label:

I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.

Sad column from Harvey Araton in The Times on the Yankees’ manager, Joe Torre, who, it’s expected, is going to be fired after the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs. (Perfect photo to accompany the column.)

The Yankees lost to the Indians because they were both out-hit and out-pitched. They were not out-managed. Before Torre took the helm, the last time the Yankees made it to the World Series was 1981, and the last time they won it was 1978. It says here that firing Torre is a mistake.

40 percent of Princeton students and faculty are using a Mac this year, up from just 10 percent four years ago. I think this “Mac use way up on college campuses” trend is hugely important for Apple. (Via Fake Steve.)

Good analysis of open source software usability by Jono DiCarlo, but it fails to address what I see as the primary problem: finding ways to fund more humane open source software. Mozilla does it with Google affiliate ad revenue from the search bar.

Lately, the correlation between AAPL stock run-ups and actual news regarding Apple is zero. Whereas most of the time there is any actual news — even news that strikes me as unambiguously good news for Apple — the stock goes down.

Thaler knows his stuff, but in mistaking our disdain for ZFS rumors as “ZFS hate,” he minimizes the real and significant problems that this advanced file system would bring to today’s Macintosh computers. Of course, part of the problem is that the post is an abbreviated argument, not our entire case.

While Google has built phone prototypes to test its software and
show off its technology to manufacturers, the company is not
likely to make the phones itself, according to analysts.

In short, Google is not creating a gadget to rival the iPhone, but
rather creating software that will be an alternative to Windows
Mobile from Microsoft and other operating systems, which are built
into phones sold by many manufacturers. And unlike Microsoft,
Google is not expected to charge phone makers a licensing fee for
the software.

This sounds smart to me. And it shows why Google has become Microsoft’s first true archrival.

Sunday, 7 October 2007

Drew Thaler on the potential for ZFS to eventually become the default file system for Mac OS X:

The bizarre rants about ZFS wasting processor time and disk space. I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware that we were still using 30MHz machines with 1.44MB floppies. ZFS is great specifically because it takes two things that modern computers tend to have a surplus of — CPU time and hard disk space — and borrows a bit of it in the name of data integrity and ease of use. This tradeoff made very little sense in, say, 1992. But here in 2007 it’s brilliant.

Peter Kafka, at Silicon Alley Insider, claims the “obvious solution” to Hannah Montana ticket scalping — wherein $67 tickets are being re-sold for upwards of $250 — is to raise the initial selling prices of the tickets, so that the money die-hard fans are willing to pay goes to the artist and concert promoter, rather than to the scalper, and then to reduce the prices after the initial high-priced demand passes.

Microsoft Corp. today announced a plan for Bungie Studios, the developers of the “Halo” franchise, to embark on a path to become an independent company. Microsoft will retain an equity interest in Bungie, at the same time continuing its long-standing publishing agreement between Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie for the Microsoft-owned “Halo” intellectual property as well as other future properties developed by Bungie.

Translation: “We’re still good friends, and we remain committed to be good parents to our child Halo.”

Friday, 5 October 2007

My thanks to Fluther.com for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Fluther is a free social-networking Q&A site with an attractive design, a simple interface, and a well-done MobileSafari-optimized version.

“Due to space limitations, AppleInsider’s latest ZFS article was published with several missing phrases and explanations. As a service to the community, we are happy to fill in the gaps in the story as published.”

Thursday, 4 October 2007

Since bouncing doesn’t work, it would be a waste of your time and network resources to do it. Including such a feature in SpamSieve would fill out the feature checklist but give the false impression that the feature should be used.

Stephen Coles on the announcement of WebKit’s support for embedded TrueType fonts:

This reopens the legal can of worms that falls off the shelf every time we talk about font embedding. Good fonts cost money. Like most software, each user or CPU must be licensed to use commercial fonts. When you start talking about every visitor of a web page downloading fonts, well, you enter very sticky territory indeed.

The conundrum is that most of the fonts worth using can’t legally be shared as free downloads, and most of the fonts that are legally shareable aren’t worth using.

Kevin Hale’s terrific explanation — replete with well-designed, informative illustrations — of Fitts’s Law, one of the most important concepts in human-to-machine interface design. (Thanks to Jacob Rus.)

WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another. This article on A List Apart describes the feature in detail. All of the examples linked to in that article work in WebKit now.

Interesting example from Intel’s Timothy Mattson regarding the dizzying array of languages currently in vogue for parallel programming:

They created two displays of gourmet jams. One display had 24 jars.
The other had 6. Each display invited people to try the jams and
offered them a discount coupon to buy the jam. They alternated these
displays in a grocery store and tracked how many people passed the
displays, how many people stopped and sampled the jams, and how many
subsequently used the offered coupon to buy the jam.

The results were surprising.

24 jar display: 60% of the people passing the display sampled the
jam, 3% purchased jam.

6 jar display: 40% of the people passing the display sampled the
jam, 30% purchased jam.

Good one from The Macalope, including this bit regarding ZDNet’s Larry Dignan’s suggestion that Apple should have offered iPhone early adopters a $250 credit:

But let the Macalope get this straight, Larry. You’re asking Apple to refund early adopters more than the price drop? That’s um, well, nuts is what that is. The Macalope didn’t think it was possible but you may have out-Enderled Rob Enderle. There’s a feather in your cap.

Amazon decided to package the application into some installer app that requires authentication to install the downloader helper. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason why admin access is required for the downloader helper and, as such, all this is doing is creating an unnecessary barrier to entry.

“We’re not putting anything but data on the iPhone, and we’re doing it in the right way, and we’re putting it in the user area of the iPhone. Apple is intentionally making sure that products like ours don’t work. That I think is a mistake - it’s as if in an iPhone OS update, Apple decided that MP3s you got from ripping a CD should no longer play on your iPhone, and you should instead buy them from their store.”

Gary Voth on why your first camera lens should be a normal prime, rather than the cheap kit zoom most consumer SLRs ship with:

Creating such images is nearly impossible with “slow” zoom lenses, which are harder to focus and inadequate for use indoors without flash. Nor can they easily render backgrounds out of focus. In fact, the technical limitations of these lenses tend to lead to the kind of snapshots that the photographer presumably bought an SLR to avoid.

Looks fantastic, but a small beef with the anchored-at-the-bottom masthead: you can’t just use Page Down to scroll the page, because you end up missing some of the lines of text that were covered by the fixed masthead.

Monday, 1 October 2007

Rainer Brockerhoff has, by far, the best technical explanation I’ve seen regarding why SIM-unlocked iPhones might be rendered inoperable by the iPhone 1.1.1 update, without assuming any sort of spiteful malfeasance on Apple’s part.

Speaking of “The Best American” anthologies, David Foster Wallace edited the 2007 edition, and his introduction is, unsurprisingly, killer — an examination regarding just what the title of the book, The Best American Essays 2007, actually means, including wondering what exactly an “essay” is:

And yet Beard’s and Orozco’s pieces are so arresting and alive and
good that they end up being salient even if one is working as a
guest essay editor and sitting there reading a dozen Xeroxed
pieces in a row before them and then another dozen in a row after
them — essays on everything from memory and surfing and Esperanto
to childhood and mortality and Wikipedia, on depression and
translation and emptiness and James Brown, Mozart, prison, poker,
trees, anorgasmia, color, homelessness, stalking, fellatio, ferns,
fathers, grandmothers, falconry, grief, film comedy — a rate of
consumption which tends to level everything out into an
undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant
reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total
Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a
culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that
I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less
to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of
saliency or value.

I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

Does it make sense even if you don’t speak French? Yes, because the movie isn’t going to have any dialogue. Says director Andrew Stanton: “I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie”.

I think it was Steven Spielberg who described R2-D2 as the most purely-cinematic character in movie history — everything we know about him comes through his beeps and minimal range of motion, and the other characters’ reactions.

Nokia, the world’s biggest cellphone maker, said today that it had agreed to pay $8.1 billion for Navteq, the maker of digital mapping and navigational software based in Chicago, as it seeks to migrate satellite-based location services onto its range of phones.

Annie Dillard: “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Update: Seems like this quote might be from Ray Bradbury, not Annie Dillard. Can anyone find a precise citation for this?

Tim Burks’s new web site for Nu, his new programming language designed from the ground-up specifically for use as an Objective-C scripting language. (See my write-up regarding Burks’s excellent presentation about Nu at C4[1] a few weeks ago.)

For those who don’t care to read the minutiae, I’ll get to the point: In my opinion, Aperture vs. Lightroom is the same discussion as Canon vs. Nikon. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not a no-brainer decision either way.